Martin Townsend

Editor of the Sunday Express

A brilliant dissection of the nature of royalty

IN THE introduction to Foreign Faces (Chatto & Windus), a collection of his travel writing, the great English author and critic VS Pritchett made the point: "Today, more people are offendable than at any other time in the history of the world."

The "today" he referred to was 1964, when the book was published, but his words ring just as true today.

He continues: "Why are they offended? They are rightly offended by errors of fact but why are personal descriptions and interpretations offensive to them? I think the tendency of modern society is to make us think there ought to be only one opinion like the standard inch."

VS Pritchett's words, which I happened to be reading last week, struck me with particular force in the light of all the furore surrounding author Hilary Mantel's description of the Duchess of Cambridge as "a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung" and a "shop window mannequin with no personality of her own".

The comments were taken from a much longer essay Mantel wrote for the london Review Of Books. It is a brilliant dissection of the nature of being a princess, and of the whole nature of royalty, much of it couched in the same quietly brutal language of her best-selling novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.

The piece examines how we look at royal women in particular, what we expect of them and what they seem to expect for themselves. In describing Paul Emsley's recent, poorly executed portrait of the Duchess, for instance, Mantel writes: "Her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared 'weary of being looked at'."

It's unsparing stuff but why should we be offended by it? Is "the modern tendency" (as Pritchett put it) to have only one opinion of the Duchess of Cambridge? Must we all agree that she is happy, hard-working, loyal, a perfect member of the Royal Family and not probe any deeper than that?

The knee-jerk reactions to Mantel's comments by Ed Miliband and David Cameron (neither of whom, I suspect, had read the whole essay) certainly seem to suggest so but why should this be the case?

Lots of people loathe the Royal Family and all the inherited power and privilege it stands for and that is their right. Mantel does not loathe the royals though; in many ways she pities them and that is a very common public sentiment I have found. The royals live in a goldfish bowl, bound by duty and tradition. How, sometimes, they must long to live a "normal" life.

This seems to be particularly the case with Prince William and his new wife who have strived, perhaps more than any other royal couple, to preserve their privacy and be "normal". But this is an impossible wish and, in trying to achieve it, by blocking the flow of information to the media and public as much as he can, William has increased their isolation.

Mantel does not loathe the royals though; in many ways she pities them and that is a very common public sentiment I have found

A royal insider (yes, such things do exist) once told me that a quite innocuous piece of information the Sunday Express had obtained about the couple, that after their wedding ceremony their first request was "tea for two", had been viewed as "the thin end of the wedge" by William. Today, descriptions of their tea-drinking, tomorrow intimate revelations of about their love life? I hardly think so.

That said, this desire to "control" the Press, to "manage" what is revealed to the public, is second nature to William and Harry, who partly blame the media for the death of their mother.

In that stultifying, rather paranoid, atmosphere, is it any wonder that the Duchess of Cambridge, an outsider let us not forget, a Berkshire businessman's daughter, should appear rather stiff and mannequin-like? Mantel, a historian and, arguably, Britain's most popular "serious" author of fiction has done the Duchess and us a favour in pointing this out, not because we suspect she might be unhappy in her role but because it would help her, and us, if we understood her a little better, if she appeared a little more human and fallible.

Mantel writes: "Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully-thin as anyone would wish; without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character."

Later she asks: "What does Kate read? It's a question." It is indeed, and an answer, any answer, would be a first small step in fleshing out the character of the Duchess. It may not make her any happier but it will make us happier for her. It is 2013: let's have no more royal mannequins.